I remember the Italian who came to the city to try and instruct us, on how to avoid the Death. He looked like Death. He wore a robe and a hook-nosed mask, and a hood. This is what we wear to avoid the Death, he told us. We laughed at him. He moved among us in the streets, his eyes hidden in the mask, but I felt, in his passing, the laughter that followed. Not of how strange he looked but of how there was nothing we could do. Looking at him, we knew, this wasn’t for Scotland. Robes and masks. We’d all be dead instead. And Italy rule the world.
It was Rome brought us this, I heard one man say, after the Italian went by. But I knew it wasn’t. Hand him a scythe, somebody, said another, and then there was more laughter. If I were to make my return, I suppose I could dress like that. Protect people from me. Disguise myself from those who know me to be dead.
There’s no more to it, Speck says, when he can tell that I’m done reading.
In the kitchen, where his housekeeper has left us a supper, we eat quietly at a Formica table, each looking off into separate corners. And then he looks up from his plate and he says, I’ll be leaving soon, in a few weeks more.
New York in the summer, I say.
Yes, he says. Delightful. Everyone bad leaves. All my friends are gone off to colonies and the like, and I can get some work done.
It’s the most beautiful thing in the world, I say.
He doesn’t pause. Yes, it is, he says. I thought so too.
They buried the whole neighborhood, I say.
Yes, he says. They’re giving tours now, sometimes. But it’s terribly unsafe. Won’t last. Just wait until some visiting mayor is trapped and that will end right quick.
At home, in bed, I imagine the fresco of Edinburgh from Speck’s ceiling on my own. Trace a tunnel down through. Before going to bed I had looked through a book of my mother’s, a guide to Scottish clans. Hunter, it said, had the motto, “I finish the hunt.” It was a dog, sitting on a crown, for the crest.
Disguise myself from those who know me to be dead. I see him crawl the timber supports. See him place the letter. Did he jump down to his death? Or did he indeed leave? Could he? In this way I keep myself awake until the morning. Blue outside my window turns to spreading white, to show me, in greater degrees, the shadow of my grandfather practicing the slow dance of his life. The colors of the morning world.
7
There’s a hole in me the size of you, from where you came through.
Edinburgh, after the Plague.
I begin building the tunnels. On a hilltop past the greenhouse where I meet Zach regularly now, to drink, I find a cellar, old-fashioned, dirt for a floor, and nothing remaining above except a few burned timbers. The tall grass hides it from the road, frames the squared-off divot here. A check with Town Hall confirms the lot is for sale but has been for thirty years. A farm here burned to the ground, 150 years ago, and nothing’s been built since. Until now.
I work on it through the year and a half remaining before college. I build a cross, inside the hill. Crude, but the winds move through. An interrogated hill. I work there with a spade, carting the dirt off to the marsh’s edge, my back aching, but the beauty of work is that it builds you while you build. I become stronger. I have my shovel out there now, the wheelbarrow also. Two years of shoveling makes a spade out of my back, narrow at the bottom, wide at the top. You’re really filling out, my mother says to me on a day near the tunnel’s completion.
Thanks, I say, grabbing an apple with slight exaggeration as I head for the door.
The first tunnel went by in two months of digging. The second had to wander around submerged deposits of bedrock. I pushed the last dirt aside and walked all the way through, end to end to end to end. Four corners here. I had read about the pyramids, burial mounds, but for me nothing matched my Edinburgh, my streets paved over, my city under a city.
In the winter, from the hilltop, you can see through the trees to Spurwink church, a white steeple there on the corner, presiding over the road and the graves in the yard behind it, the marsh farther out. Down below, in the hill, I have set sconces in the walls, for torches, citronella to keep out the mosquitoes. The floor is slate. I go down. The secret of the king of the hill is that he rules it from underneath. In the dark, I smoke. I sing, sometimes, pretending it is the Plague years, and that I have been left here to die in the buried city, to sing songs for the dead. Other times I think of Peter.
One day I come home from Speck’s and my grandfather is waiting for me, smiling. You like old things, he says, right? I set my books down and follow him back to his quarters, Under his bed, wrapped in a blanket, is something preposterous. A cannon. Bronze. Unbelievably ugly. Short and thick. Where’s it from? I ask.
I get from G.I., he says. But is Portuguese. Very old. Sixteenth century. They give to Korea, to help keep Korea safe. Long, long time ago. G.I. take it, but he need something and so he give me it.
I remember the pictures of my grandfather on his boat. A very long fishing vessel. G.I.s, I was sure, probably had occasion to need a few things. You like it, he asks. Look. Have firing piece. Also, cannonballs.
Yeah, I say. Gramps, we could declare war.
He laughs so hard at this tears come down his face. And later I realize this is probably the only time I have seen him cry.
I want to fire it.
When I tell Speck about it, he laughs. Sure, he says. The spice trade. But really. It’s worth a fortune. Keep an eye on it, and don’t let him use it in any arguments.
I tell Mom. We, she says, setting out the plates for dinner, have never had a normal family. But promise me, she says. Don’t go telling anyone. Because, and she sighs. Because he didn’t ask if he could take it. Korean national treasures, she says. They are a tenacious bunch about it. Almost everything they had was taken from them. Here, she says, and lifts the lid on a pot of American chop suey. Taste this.
8
The survivor gets to tell the story. Have you figured out who survives yet? Zach calls me one afternoon. We haven’t spoken for most of the summer, the weeks quiet from the sound of us not calling each other. It’s over three years since the trial, three months since we last had sex. And then a night shortly after that, he had driven over and asked me, Do you think I’m gay?
He leans his head against the windshield of his car, where we sit to talk in private, in the driveway of my house. Zach’s two older brothers had been harassing him about getting a girlfriend. He’d told them to lay off. They’d told him to get laid. I roll down the window.
What we did, I say, wasn’t…
What?
We were kids, I say. Experiments. You know. No, I don’t think you’re gay.
You don’t.
Nope. You’re not like me.
As soon as I had said it, everything about us became the past tense. As soon as I said, did. Did. What we did. You’re not like me. When I said that, I saw that he wouldn’t be. And so I hear from him next on an afternoon when I am thinking of how we are both to leave for school soon, how I am going to Korea before that happens, to see relatives. Zach calls. Meet me at the greenhouse, he says. Tonight.
I am apprehensive. He had developed friends who bored me so quickly the protective sounds of my own thoughts swept over me and shut out the sounds of them almost as soon as they said hello. As soon as they started talking to me, I heard my own voice about them, saying things I couldn’t say out loud, knowing it would offend them. In the way a pianist won’t shake hands, my ears don’t listen, if they sense a bone-crushing squeeze lies in wait.